Obamacare: We pull the plug so you don’t have to

“When liberals merely settle for lying, they’re being on their best behavior. That’s why when it was discovered that Obama had been lying for three years when he repeatedly told us that we would all be able to keep our medical insurance and our doctors, he wasn’t compelled to say, ‘That being the case, let’s toss out the Affordable Care Act and start over. After all, its passage was based entirely on fraud, and that’s just not the way we do things in America.’

“And when, in February, 2014, Kathleen Sebelius, aka Cruella DeVil, said that she had no idea where anyone had come up with the goofy notion that ObamaCare required at least seven million sign-ups by the end of March to be considered a success, I only wish I had been nearby to remind her that in September, 2013, a scant six months earlier, she had said, ‘Success would be at least seven million signed up by the end of March.’

“Of course there’s always the chance she wasn’t fibbing. It could mean the early onslaught of Alzheimer’s. She really should go in for a check-up, and since she isn’t covered by ObamaCare, I’m sure she’d actually be able to find a doctor.” — Burt Prelutsky, Republicans Against Democrats

“I went to healthcare.gov and — I guess I had heard this, but had blocked it from my memory like a rape victim unable to remember her attack — you can’t even peek at the available plans until you’ve given the government reams of personal information about yourself. … Inasmuch as the cost of health insurance under Obamacare is so high that it will generally make more sense just to pay for your own catastrophic health emergencies, I was not interested in telling Kathleen Sebelius everything about me in order to have the privilege of glancing at the government’s crappy plans.

“With zero help from the Obamacare website, I eventually figured out that there was one lone insurance plan that would cover treatment at a reputable hospital. The downside is, no doctors take it. So my only two health insurance options — and yours, too, as soon as the waivers expire, America! — are: (1) a plan that no doctors take; or (2) a plan that no hospitals take. You either pay for all your doctor visits and tests yourself, or you pay for your cancer treatment yourself. And you pay through the nose in either case.

“That’s not insurance. It’s a huge transfer of wealth from people who work for a living to those who don’t, accomplished by forcing the workers to buy insurance that’s not insurance. … It’s not ‘insurance’ when what I want to insure against isn’t covered, but paying for other people’s health care needs — defined broadly — is mandatory. It’s as if you wanted to buy a car, so you paid for a Toyota — but then all you got was a 10-speed bike, with the rest of your purchase price going to buy cars, bikes and helmets for other people.” — Ann Coulter, Screw You, Mickey Kaus

“Obamacare is a fiasco. Why don’t the media acknowledge that? And it’s fair to ask: why don’t they ridicule it? … They’re burying the story. They aren’t in denial. They know the truth. They’re just choosing to ignore it. They are pretending there are no broken promises about keeping your insurance plan, or keeping your doctor, or lowering your premium by $2,500 a year. They are pretending, like Ellen DeGeneres told the president, that everyone in America loves Obamacare. …

“None of the networks dared to report the ongoing opposition of the American people to Obamacare in 2014, even when they were the ones doing the polling. In early March, NBC’s pollsters found 49 percent of adults opposed to Obamacare versus only 35 percent who supported it. But NBC Nightly News would not even touch its own poll.

“Last September, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calmly told Dr. Nancy Snyderman on NBC Nightly News that ‘I think success looks like at least seven million people having signed up by the end of March 2014.’ Now, Team Obama claims they have five million — if you flagrantly ignore whether the sign-ups have actually paid for their policy, which is the only way to ‘get covered.’ And when you consider the five million who have lost their policy, you stand at zero.” — L. Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, Incredible Shrinking ObamaCare

“Regarding Ezekiel Emanuel’s ‘ObamaCare’s Fourth Anniversary–Progress, With Caveats’ (op-ed, March 22): Dr. Emanuel applauds the Affordable Care Act (ACA), claiming that ‘more than five million Americans have selected a private insurance plan on an exchange,’ and falsely implying that these five million were uninsured but now have coverage. Don’t trust that claim. Selecting is one thing, paying another. Insurers report that only 80%-roughly four million-have paid a premium and are therefore covered. And only 27% of them, according to McKinsey & Co., are newly covered. The rest are part of the five million to six million whose plans were canceled because of ObamaCare.

“There has been no net gain in people with private insurance, data suggest. Worse, some of the cancellations forced ill people into ObamaCare plans that don’t allow access to doctors, hospitals and medications they need, including specialized cancer hospitals and drugs for multiple sclerosis. Dr. Emanuel argues in his book Reinventing American Health Care that choice is overrated. Not if you have MS or cancer. …

“Dr. Emanuel says the next change should be paying doctors a fixed sum per patient regardless of the care needed. This turns doctors into insurance companies. What a doctor prescribes for you comes out of your doctor’s own pocket at the end of the year, setting up a conflict with the person you need to trust. We the people have learned not to trust what advocates of ObamaCare tell us.” — Betsy McCaughey, McCaughey vs. Emanuel

“In 2009, the Congressional Budget Office set the net cost of Obamacare at $599 billion over 10 years — citing a gross cost of $848 billion less $249 billion in tax revenues and other cost savings. But recently the CBO revised the 10-year price tag to more than $2 trillion. Economist Jonathan Gruber recently admitted that well, no, costs will not be going down. ‘Covering people with health insurance doesn’t save money,’ said Gruber. ‘The law isn’t designed to save money. It’s designed to improve health, and that’s going to cost money.’

“So Obamacare won’t save money, but at least those too poor to afford health insurance will now lead healthier lives, right? Not necessarily. Oregon expanded its Medicaid program years ago to include some of Oregon’s low-income uninsured. Because of costs, Oregon did this on a random lottery basis. Some got it, some wanted to but couldn’t. … But there were no significant differences in their health care outcomes. While the newly insured did increase their doctor visits for preventative and primary-care services, some could not get appointments with doctors, many of whom wouldn’t take new Medicaid patients. Emergency room use went up 40 percent among the new Medicaid patients, not down — all for non-emergency medical needs.

“Worse, the uninsured dislike Obamacare even more than do those with health insurance. A recent Kaiser Health poll found that among the uninsured, only 22 percent have a favorable attitude toward Obamacare, a far lower percentage than the 56 percent of uninsured who are unfavorable toward Obamacare.” — Larry Elder, Abuse of Power Endangers the Nation’s Health

“In order to make ObamaCare work (by suckering millions of gullible Americans into thinking it was free or cheap), the White House and Democrats in Congress told insurance companies they had to offer affordable policies. But the insurance companies balked. They knew in advance they couldn’t possibly be able to offer ObamaCare’s Cadillac policies at such low-low prices without soon incurring huge-huge losses.

“No problemo, the generous ObamaCare-givers said to the insurance companies. We’ll bury this little ‘risk corridor’ mumbo jumbo — Section 1342 — in the act somewhere. Congress won’t find it for years. It guarantees that the federal government will cover your ObamaCare losses through 2016. Just don’t blab about it, please, because it’s kind of embarrassing for us progressives to be seen subsidizing Big Health Insurance.

“It turns out that behind all the high-minded B.S. about providing every American with affordable healthcare, ObamaCare is simply another corporate welfare project. Only this time it’s for the benefit of health insurance companies.” — Michael Reagan, Deception 1342 of the Affordable Care Act

“The current data is not breaking well for an administration that projected the percentage of ObamaCare purchasers in the 18 to 35 age group would be 40 percent. As of March 1, approximately 4.2 million Americans had selected an ObamaCare plan. Less than 1.1 million, or only 25 percent of them, belonged to that demographic. From October through February, the number of signups averaged out to 840,000 per month. In order to reach the 40 percent figure by the end of this month, more than 900,000 people would have to sign up for the plan — and everyone of them and their covered family members would have to be between the ages of 18 and 35.

“And once again, note the term ‘sign ups.’ On Tuesday, embattled White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was finally forced to admit what many Americans have known for a long time: sign ups isn’t remotely the same as pay ups. ‘We can point you to major insurers who have placed that [pay up] figure at 80 percent, give-or-take, depending on the insurer,’ Carney said. That means one-in-five don’t have actual coverage. When Fox News correspondent Ed Henry originally asked Carney why the administration continues to use the word ‘enrolled,’ Carney declined to answer.

“The lack of candor is hardly an anomaly. The president promised that health insurance would be more affordable, saving families as much as $2500 per year in costs. That was a baldfaced lie. But it was the lesser of two baldfaced lies with which insurance companies had to cope. The greater lie was the president’s oft-repeated promise that Americans could keep their doctor and their healthcare providers. Faced with bad or worse, insurance companies chose bad: in response to the Obama administration’s benefit mandates, taxes and regulations, they narrowed provider networks to keep premium costs down.

“ObamaCare is hideously expensive, and only a portion of the cost is borne by the inflated insurance premiums so many of its subjects are expected to pay. It’s the worst Cash for Clunkers scheme Obama has come up with yet – it’s costing us billions to get the ACA clunker into second gear. We can’t afford to spend more billions every year while bureaucrats fiddle with the clutch and gear shift, especially since ObamaCare’s critics – who have always understand the law far better than its supporters – think third gear will never kick in.

“‘After four years of implementation, countless delays, a website disaster, and constant litigation, the Affordable Care Act celebrates its inauspicious birthday this week,’ says the introduction to a new study from the American Action Forum. ‘From a regulatory perspective, the law has imposed more than $27.2 billion in total private sector costs, $8 billion in unfunded state burdens, and more than 159 million paperwork hours on local governments and affected entities. What’s more troubling, the law has generated just $2.6 billion in annualized benefits, compared to $6.8 billion in annualized costs. In other words, the ACA has imposed 2.5 times more costs than it has produced in benefits.’

“One hundred fifty-nine million paperwork hours is more than double what the hideously complicated, economy-retarding Dodd-Frank law dumped on Americans – enough of a burden to keep 80,000 people working 2,000 hours per year. Of course, Big Government liberals believe private-sector time is without value – you should be happy to spend hours expressing your patriotism by wrestling with mandatory paperwork! – but even government agencies, such as HHS and the Treasury, are paying for millions of hours of paper-shuffling due to the Affordable Care Act. Or, more to the point, they’re forcing you to pay for it by funding these bloated agencies; but at least they acknowledge the cost exists, unlike the private-sector compliance costs they try to obscure.

“ObamaCare imposes costs far beyond paperwork compliance, of course. All those mandates, plus dozens of hidden taxes, siphon more billions out of the private economy. And all this for a law that has, thus far, actually increased the number of uninsured Americans! … Instead of wasting billions and wrecking the insurance industry to give a handful of people access to lousy insurance policies with huge out-of-pocket costs, we could have bought every uninsured person in America circa 2008 a Cadillac health care plan for a fraction of the cost.” — John Hayward, ObamaCare: The Mistake America Could Not Afford